This article presents examples of how strategic thinking evolved in a sample of health conversion foundations as they determined how they would address various social determinants of health. The article also considers how a foundation can develop a strategic pathway that fits with its mission, values, philosophy, resources, and sphere of influence.
Philanthropy scholarship has the potential to inform practice and policy so that societal wellbeing is enhanced and positive change achieved. How can we make this happen? This special feature suggests two possibilities and also documents some successful experiences of knowledge transfer that may serve as prototypes for bridging the divide.
This guide looks at how funders collaborate with and bring support to indigenous communities around the world. Through examples from a diverse range of foundations, this guide explores how grantmakers work with indigenous peoples, the approaches they take, and the practices they find effective.
This report offers two high impact strategies for grantmakers to more effectively achieve their missions and help address disparate health outcomes resulting from unequal opportunities.
Getting serious about philanthropy is like embarking on a voyage. But the journey can also quickly become overwhelming; the social and environmental needs are so great that it can be hard to know where to start! To help, we’ve created a wide range of resources to inform and inspire. Explore the sections to learn more about how to get started in your philanthropy and to keep improving as you go.
A growing number of foundations and philanthropists have elected to give away their money by a fixed date rather than establish perpetual foundations. The paths they’ve chosen to take, and how they chose them, provide useful tips for other philanthropists on how they can align their giving with a path that best accommodates their goals.
This article describes the network-building strategy of the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation and the role that network officers play in carrying out this strategy. The author then assesses whether this strategy adds value for networks and discusses a range of complications that the strategy introduces, especially with regard to the grantmaker-grantee relations. Assuming that the foundation can meet these challenges, this approach may turn out to be the most effective way for a foundation to assist networks in achieving their full potential.
This article, based on interviews with leaders of 10 family foundations, investigates the impact of geographic dispersion on governance, administration, decision making, and grantmaking activities.
The Annie E. Casey Foundation developed a exible but rigorous “results framework” tool that helped focus its investments and choose grantees that shared its aims by de ning success, specifying results, tracking progress, and aligning its work. The framework includes an understanding of population and program accountability and lays out overarching categories for thinking about results: impact, in uence, and leverage. This paper described how the tool was developed and tested with grantees and shares lessons learned for other philanthropies in the eld of education.
While foundation leadership and staff value strategy and foundations largely perceive themselves as strategic, they often struggle to articulate, implement, and track strategy. The William Penn Foundation has developed a collection of tools to articulate and assess its progress toward strategic goals.
This article reports on a 10-year W.K. Kellogg Foundation funded program of local development work in selected geographic areas in Northeast Brazil. The greatest lesson was the fundamental importance of intentional strategies to bring all three sectors together, to attract and facilitate public and private sector involvement in civil society projects for local development and poverty reduction.
The Colorado Healthy Communities Initiative (CHCI) was a comprehensive community initiative designed and funded by The Colorado Trust as a means of empowering citizens to make their communities healthier. This paper describes: the background and development of the initiative, including the general principles that underlay the CHCI model; the degree to which the planning process was carried out according to the model within the various sites; and the initiative’s key outcomes, especially with regard to civic engagement, new health-promotion programs, and new infrastructure for community problem-solving.
